Timestamps

0:30 – hello
3:49 – strat
33:19 – peter

Strategy

Hero ($280) has AsQh UTG, opens to $10. 3 callers, including Villain on the button.

Flop comes Ad4c2c. Pot is $35 after rake. Checks to Villain who bets $25, Hero calls, rest fold.

Turn is Kc. Pot is $85. Hero checks to Villain who bets $50. Hero calls.

River is 9s. Pot is $185. Hero checks to Villain who jams which would put Hero all-in for remaining $195.

The debate team at the Academy of Public Service sailed into the “elite eight” last year at the national championships in Chicago.

Now, thanks to that oratorical success, the debaters have talked their way into another year of funding as their school merges with the nearby Noonan Business Academy in Codman Square.

“The output of the debate team was a big part of the decision,” said team coach Locksley Bryan. “They saw these kids doing academic calisthenics at a very high level and it impressed them.”

The backstory, as I understand it, is that several years ago the Boston Public Schools received a multi-year, multi-million-dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support a transition to small schools. The grant funded the dissolution of Boston’s large public high schools into multiple small schools sharing a single building. Thus, what was Dorchester High School became three schools within the renamed Dorchester Education Complex: Tech Boston, Noonan Business Academy, and the Academy of Public Service (APS).

Dorchester is one of the more troubled neighborhoods in Boston, and these schools had more than their share of problems. APS, however, was fortunate enough to have a wonderful headmaster and several great teachers who saw the value that a debate team could have for their students and their school. They got in touch with me, and I helped them start such a program three years ago.

Thanks to the efforts of the aforementioned faculty, APS quickly became one of the most successful schools in the League, putting up some of the best participation numbers and repeatedly taking top honors at citywide competitions. This was a big deal for a school that used to be known derogatorily among Boston’s young people as “Dumbchester”.

The Gates grant expires at the end of the current school year, and BPS seems to be reconsolidating some (though not nearly all) of the small schools it created. APS was slated to be absorbed by the more popular Tech Boston and its students dispersed. However, teachers, faculty, students, alumni, and community members rallied in support of their school. As the most eloquent orators, several of the debaters took leadership roles in this effort, speaking before the Boston Schools Committee about the value of the Academy of Public Service. The debate team was one of the flagship programs to which they pointed as evidence of the school’s success.

As an organization, we’ve learned a lot from this event. We’ve come to appreciate more fully how much a debate team can transform a school culture, ultimately affecting even non-debaters in a positive way. When intellectual competition takes on the fun, excitement, credibility, and even popularity of a sports team at a school, that school is bound to improve. Joining the debate team becomes a cool, or at least socially acceptable, thing to do, and more kids get into it. These students, and the teachers who coach them, bring their newly acquired skills into their classrooms, raising the quality of the class for all its students.

An alumnus of the APS debate team who now volunteers as a judge at our competitions put it best when he told me, “If they had said three years ago that they wanted to close APS, I wouldn’t have argued with them. It was a bad school. But it changed when the debate team came along. Debate turned around a lot of kids lives. Kids who were going to drop out started coming to school again so they could debate. It’s a much better school now and I don’t think they should close it.”

After the panel, there was a reception. It was a small crowd, and I was one of the only students there, certainly the least consequential person by a mile. My professor called Bill over to introduce him to me, and I began to tell him my story, “I was interested to hear about the [High School] chess team you met, because I actually coach a debate team at that same school. I’ve had similar-“

Before I finish my second sentence, Bill cuts me off, grabs my hand, says “Great to meet you,” turns his back, and goes over to talk to someone else.

So yeah, Bill Ayers is a terrorist. And a douchebag.

“If you were to walk into some of those schools — which are spread along a crescent-shaped corridor on either side of Interstate 95 from the southern edge of North Carolina to the northern edge of Georgia — you might forget that you were in the United States.

A former South Carolina commerce secretary, Charles Way, talks in the film about the time his car broke down near one of these schools and he went inside to use a phone.

“I just couldn’t really believe my eyes,” he said. “It was the most deplorable building condition that I’ve ever seen in my life. How the hell somebody could teach in an environment like that is really just beyond me.”

Among many other problems, ancient plumbing has resulted in raw sewage backing up into some schools, bringing in vermin and unbearable odors. The first school profiled in “Corridor of Shame” was built in 1896.

Some 700,000 students attend these rural schools, and they are being left behind in droves. One principal complained about nonfiction books in the school library that dated back to the 1940s and ’50s, including a volume that promised “one day man will land on the moon.”

The rural schools in South Carolina are symptoms of a much wider problem. Only about 50 percent of the state’s children graduate from high school.”

Inter-state disparity in education funding isn’t something that Kozol addresses, and my guess as to why is that public education is a right enshrined at the state rather than the federal level. Unlike the federal constitution, all 50 state constitutions make some provision for public education. When the US constitution has been applied to education, it’s generally been via the 14th amendment’s prohibition against any individual state’s inequitable provision of a right, privilege, or public good. In other words, the US constitution does not guarantee citizens a public education, but it does guarantee that if your state chooses to provide public education, that it must do so equitably.

This is why the scheme of funding public education through local property taxes is so disingenuous. It is a right provided at the state level, yet in fulfilling this obligation, states delegate its provision to local governments in a way that guarantees funding disparities.

There are plenty of good reasons for local control of education that have nothing to do with racism or the perpetuation of inequality, but it is surely naive to think that those latter factors have nothing to do with the local funding scheme. Many school districts have been gerrymandered specifically to isolate a wealthy enclave, ensuring that its resources go only to its own children and often that its school stay largely white as a result.

These sometimes arbitrary school district lines are what enabled the “white flight” that followed the Supreme Court’s Brown decision and the subsequent attempts to desegregate public schools. White families could keep their children in segregated schools by moving out of diverse urban school districts and into largely white suburbs. In a case called Milliken v. Bradley, the Court protected this strategy by holding that students could not be forced to desegregate across district lines.

The final chapter of Kozol’s book is built around the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in San Antonio v. Rodriguez that intrastate disparities in funding for public education do not constitute actionable discrimination. Once again, the familiar canards of the “adequate” education and the indirect correlation between money and quality rear their ugly heads:

“The argument here is not that the children in districts having relatively low assessable property values are receiving no public education; rather, it is that they are receiving a poorer quality education than that available to children in districts having more assessable wealth. Apart from the unsettled and disputed question whether the quality of education may be determined by the amount of money [411 U.S. 1, 24] expended for it, 56 a sufficient answer to appellees’ argument is that, at least where wealth is involved, the Equal Protection Clause does not require absolute equality or precisely equal advantages. 57 Nor, indeed, in view of the infinite variables affecting the educational process, can any system assure equal quality of education except in the most relative sense. Texas asserts that the Minimum Foundation Program provides an “adequate” education for all children in the State. By providing 12 years of free public-school education, and by assuring teachers, books, transportation, and operating funds, the Texas Legislature has endeavored to “guarantee, for the welfare of the state as a whole, that all people shall have at least an adequate program of education. This is what is meant by `A Minimum Foundation Program of Education.'”

In their dissent, Justices Marshall and Douglass point out the inherent inequality of local property tax as a funding mechanism for public education:

“It is clear, moreover, that the disparity of per-pupil revenues cannot be dismissed as the result of lack of local effort – that is, lower tax rates – by property-poor districts. To the contrary, the data presented below indicate that the poorest districts tend to have the highest tax rates and the richest districts tend to have the lowest tax rates. 12 Yet, despite the apparent extra effort being made by the poorest districts, they are unable even to begin to match the richest districts in terms of the production of local revenues. For example, the 10 richest districts studied by Professor Berke were able to produce $585 per pupil with an equalized tax rate of 31› [411 U.S. 1, 76] on $100 of equalized valuation, but the four poorest districts studied, with an equalized rate of 70› on $100 of equalized valuation, were able to produce only $60 per pupil. 13 Without more, this state-imposed system of educational funding presents a serious picture of widely varying treatment of Texas school districts, and thereby of Texas schoolchildren, in terms of the amount of funds available for public education.”

In other words, school districts with a lower property base do not even have the option of providing an education on the order of what their wealthier counterparts can offer. Contrary to the popular claim that education is somehow undervalued in poor and/or minority communities, these districts often allocate larger portions of their income to education than do their suburban counterparts. However, a smaller chunk of the much higher suburban property base still goes a lot further. Justices Marshall and Douglas state even more clearly that,

Kozol also points out that tax-exempt public institutions such as libraries, museums, and universities are more likely to occupy urban than suburban real estate. Even though occupants of nearby suburbs may be equally or more likely to patronize these institutions, they are a drain on the urban tax base.

Following the Rodriguez decision’s foreclosure of federal action against educational funding inequality, there was hope that state constitutions might provide a better avenue of appeal. Thirty years later, that approach has unfortunately not yet panned out.

It has been 25 years since Savage Inequalities was first published, and there have been some changes. Schools are still funded primarily by local property taxes, guaranteeing that wealthier school districts will produce better educated children. However, the federal role in education has greatly increased, and funds from Title I and other revenue streams have in some cases ironed out the most glaring disparities. According to a 2002 study by the Government Accounting Office, pupils in Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis now receive more investment than their suburban counterparts.

But I have worked in two of these districts, and I have seen and heard about conditions at some schools that would not be tolerated in Newton or New Trier. Without engaging in an extensive critique of the GAO’s numbers, I will say that there are some reasons why they may be misleading. Dropout rates, in part of a product of inferior schools, are much higher in the city. In fact, as Kozol points out, schools often plan for and rely on substantial numbers of students dropping out. Thus, 35 students may be assigned to a classroom with 27 desks on the safe assumption that 8 of those students will not be attending school by the end of the first semester. While per-pupil spending may be high for those students who remain in school, the numbers may not be so rosy when distributed across all of the students that the district ought to be educating.

Moreover, federal education funds are from a free lunch. No Schools Left Behind, the latest incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act that authorizes most federal education spending, including Title I, imposes stringent requirements on schools to raise their standardized test scores or lose their money. The result is ‘teaching to the test’, an education built as much around test-taking skills as around knowledge. Even when asking very progressive, well-meaning administrators for relatively paltry sums of money, I am often asked about how debate affects test scores. Dutiful booster that I am, I’m prepared with an encouraging answer, but sometimes it’s hard not to feel like a part of the problem myself.

In the realm of desegregation, there has been no improvement. If anything, segregation has gotten worse than it was when Savage Inequalities was published and is now as bad as it has been since the Brown decision more than 50 years ago. Sadly, the trend seems to be towards ever greater segregation, as courts around the country are scaling back or eliminating busing schemes. The new conservative majority in the Supreme Court ruled during its last term, in a decision in the case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, that school districts may not even voluntarily elect to desegregate themselves by making race-based student assignments to public schools. It is cruel and ironic how the 13th amendment, the Brown decision, and even the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, have been co-opted by the conservative agenda in defense of segregation and, by extension, inequality.

One thing I admire about Kozol is that he is much more upfront about his agenda and the sacrifices required than are many other advocates of reform. He admits that, “Attorneys in school-equalization suits have done their best to understate the notion of ‘redistribution’ of resources. They try instead, whenever possible, to speak in terms that seem to offer something good for everyone involved…. No matter what devices are contrived to bring about equality, it is clear that they require money-transfer, and the largest source of money is the portion of the population that possesses the most money.”

This is where the issue gets thorny. Moral outrage is one of Kozol’s strongest weapons, and seeing the conditions of the schools he visits, it is hard not to be outraged. The problem is that it is getting harder and harder to find a specific law or institution, let alone specific individuals, to be outraged at.

One of the book’s themes, with which I agree, is that disappointingly little has changed since Brown v. Board of Education outlawed legal segregation and indeed since Plessy v. Ferguson allowed segregated facilities provided they were equal. What we have now is a separate and unequal system of education. What has changed is that no one in particular is responsible for this patently unjust system. There is no law that says, “only blacks shall attend DuSable High School,” and no Southern governor barring the door of a white school. Instead, there are parents, often liberal parents who in theory favor school desegregation and even affirmative action, trying to do what is best for their own children. And who can blame them for that?

Honestly, I think we have to blame them. Not in an angry or condescending way, necessarily, but as a society we need to ask for more sacrifices from those who have the most. The fifty years since Brown have demonstrated that schools that were actively segregated are not going to desegregate themselves. White families have moved out of cities, gerrymandered school district lines, and even pulled their kids from public school systems altogether rather than see them attend integrated schools.

This is undoubtedly racism, but it isn’t, for the most part, the open and virulent racism embodied by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Many of these families have had no problem inviting upper-middle-class blacks into their classrooms, their neighborhoods, their homes, and their lives. It isn’t black people per se that they fear, it is the idea that their children might receive anything less than the best education they could possibly provide for them. There’s nothing wrong with caring so much about your kids’ education, but there is a problem with providing such opportunities to your own children at the expense of other children. There is a problem with not caring, at least not caring enough to do anything really drastic, that so many other children will attend schools and live in neighborhoods that you have deemed unacceptable for your own progeny.

I am also not speaking here of a small group of especially wealthy or especially inconsiderate people. There were literally hundreds of thousands of white families who fled urban areas and their public education systems in the wake of the Brown decision. In a particularly striking passage, Kozol describes an upscale suburb of New York City called Riverdale, where

“Dozens of college students… went south during the civil rights campaigns to fight for… desegregation…. The parents of these students often made large contributions to support the work of SNCC and CORE. One generation passes, and the cruelties they fought in Mississippi have come north to New York City. Suddenly, no doubt unwittingly, they find themselves opposed to simple things they would have died for 20 years before. Perhaps it isn’t fair to say they are ‘opposed.’ A better word might be ‘oblivious.’ They do not want poor children to be harmed. They simply want the best for their own children. To the children of the South Bronx, it is all the same.”

I’m no wishy-washy, self-esteem-promoting, “all children are beautiful” hippy. I believe in merit, I believe in special programs for gifted/talented/advanced/whatever-you-want-to-call-them students, and I am perfectly comfortable stating that some people and some kids are smarter, more capable, and all around better and more deserving than others. Higher education is not for everyone, and we need plenty of people to work low-wage, unskilled jobs in our economy. What I am not comfortable with is making those distinctions based on the test scores of a first grader, or even more troubling, based on the color of her skin or the size of her father’s salary.

Yet these factors are, implicitly and sometimes even explicitly, the basis on which a great many privileges and opportunities are distributed in America. It is profoundly troubling to me to think of how much innate talent goes unrealized and how much potential is squandered when these children who could have been great scientists, inventors, educators, and leaders instead wind up picking fruit, serving time, or pushing up daisies. As Kozol puts it:

“what is now encompassed by the one word (“school”) are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance, and intention, serve entirely different roles. Both are needed for our nation’s governance. But children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed….

“Societies cannot be all generals, no soldiers. But, by our schooling patterns, we assure that soldiers’ children are more likely to be soldiers and that the offspring of the generals will have at least the option to be generals.”

Nor is this a matter of free enterprise under assault from communists clamoring to drag all schools down to the lowest common denominator. On this point, Kozol quotes school reform activist John Coons to the effect that there is “no greater threat to the capitalist system than the present cyclical replacement of the ‘fittest’ of one generation by their artificially advantaged offspring. Worse, when that advantage is proffered to the children of the successful by the state, we can be sure that free enterprise has sold its birthright.” Much like a state-granted monopoly, disparities in education artificially stifle competition and enable less able, less deserving, and less competent people to fill the most powerful and important roles in society.

As most of you know, I’ve done a lot of work, both paid and unpaid, in the Chicago and Boston Public Schools. Racial and economic justice is very important to me, particularly in the context of education. I’ve rarely encountered anyone who articulated the importance of these issues as well as Kozol, nor anyone who could so deftly expose the most common justifications for the educational disparities that exist in US public education. The book is a lot heavier on outrage and indignation than on solutions, but from what I’ve seen, that is sadly appropriate. There is much to be outraged about in urban public education, and when it comes to systemic reform, more than 100 years of effort have not yet produced a solution to the dual problems of institutional neglect and racism.

Savage Inequalities weaves history and policy criticism with narratives of the author’s visits to urban public schools and conversations with students, teachers and administrators. Despite a century of legal and legislative action, Kozol argues, America maintains a separate and unequal public education system in which poor, largely minority children, arguably those who deserve the most resources, receive an education that is qualitatively different from that of their whiter, wealthier counterparts. These inequalities persist within urban public school systems and between urban and suburban districts, the dividing lines of which were often drawn with explicitly racialized intent.

Kozol’s narrative approach is valuable because of how much reality is lost, often deliberately obscured, by the policy debates that surround public education. One common argument that the author addresses repeatedly is the claim that urban students receive an “adequate” education and that more money is not the solution to whatever problems may plague their schools. Leaving aside for a moment the question of what “adequate” really means, Kozol’s recounting of bathrooms without stall doors or toilet paper, cafeterias that are routinely closed because of sewage overflow, asphalt playgrounds studded with broken glass, and classrooms without textbooks and in some cases even teachers fly in the face of any definition of the word. It is equally laughable to suggest that money is not a solution to these problems nor that solving these problems would not make education a more positive experience for the children who attend these schools.

This is not to say that more money is a magic-bullet solution to the problems of urban public education or that education is such a solution for larger problems such as poverty and drugs that confront these communities. It is often argued, both by amateurs and by education professionals, that family and cultural problems contribute to an environment where academic skills are not valued or nurtured. Indeed, there is little doubt that children in wealthier school districts would do better in school whether or not that wealth were directly channeled into their schools. Their parents would generally play a larger role in their education and their privilege would afford them more time for study and academic work without the distractions of a rumbling stomach or neighborhood violence.

As Kozol points out, however, “The family… differs from the school in the significant respect that government is not responsible, or at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in public education.” It violates any interpretation of justice for a public resource to be provided in greater amounts to those least in need, yet this is exactly how public education functions in the United States.